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National Book Awards Acceptance Speeches

Mark Twain said he hated the past because it was so
"damned humiliating;" hated prying; hated to read over
old letters, they "make my flesh creep," he said. His
biographer is inevitably his enemy, and there were nights
during the writing of this book when punishment from
beyond the grave seemed perfectly possible. There were
also, when this book was finished and its subject laid
to rest once again, weeks of a very powerful emotion
which I finally recognized as grief.

The terms that I had to arrive at with Samuel Clemens
were these: That the purpose of biography is not to
tame a man's wildness but to devise a form of literary
narrative in which he seems to be acting out his complexities
once again -- the point being that a man's life may
not be a work of art, but his biography ought to acknowledge
certain strivings in that direction.